For my sons,
Joshua and Tobiah
Contents
Preface
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
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39
Acknowledgements
I watch the child struggle. Trying to make her mouth do what her father’s mouth has done. Lips pressed together to make buh. Upper teeth grazed over the lower lip with a puff of air to give fuh. And finally the rounded lips for lo.
Buffalo.
I like to see the word spoken even though it isn’t correct.
I’m a bison. Buffalo or bison, it matters little. As with others who have come here, the word seemed to mean nothing to the girl, even after her father said the Mounties made huge coats from my hide, the Indians pemmican from my flesh.
They’ve moved on now, on to the next gallery. I’ve never seen it but I can guess from the comments — the large brown eyes, how gracefully they run — that it’s a deer. I’ve always been in this gallery. Along with a rabbit that never ceases to crouch in the long grasses. Grasses that are brittle and unscented, not moist and sweet smelling like those I was raised on.
The child’s stumbling lips stir memories of calves in the springtime.
Swaying bodies. Crumbling legs. Then sprawled on the ground.
There is nothing about calves in the plaque that hangs beside my gallery. Through countless recitations I’ve come to know what is written there:
Bison (Bison bison). Weight ranges from 800 to 1,500 pounds. Largest land mammal on the North American continent. Roamed in the Plains regions — Saskatchewan, Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, Kansas. At its zenith is estimated to have numbered in the millions. Of great importance to Plains Indians.
Some who come to the museum give barely a glance in my direction. Some of the younger ones run their tongues over my glass, draw their fingers through the wetness.
Why do they come? Do they come to remember? Or is it new memories they seek?
Do they want to know that in my life, before this museum, I fathered many calves?
It wasn’t easy to get with a cow. If she wasn’t ready for you she’d push and shove, turn away, or drop onto her belly or knees. My loud voice and fearsome challenges of the younger bulls were of no consequence. The cow decided when she’d be mounted. Once she did, it was a quick affair. Always the wolves were lurking. And there were other cows to be attended to if the herd was to remain strong.
Through the dark prairie winter the cows swelled up with the next generation.
If the winter wasn’t too harsh, in the spring many calves, slippery and wet, dropped onto the earth.
Every year it was the same. Until it stopped.
Until the hunting was relentless.
Why do they come?
There was one person, an old Indian woman, with whom it was different.
When she visited, my glass seemed to disappear.
The buffalo are strange animals; sometimes they are so stupid and infatuated that a man may walk up to them in full sight on the open prairie, and even shoot several of their number before the rest will think it is necessary to retreat. Again at another moment they will be so shy and wary, that in order to approach them the utmost skill, experience and judgment are necessary.
— Francis Parkman, Buffalo Hunt, 1849
1
Wrinkled moccasins scraping over a painted plywood floor that rarely felt the scratch of a broom, Elinor shuffled to the kitchen and banged the kettle onto the stove. A shiver, unfettered by flannel pajamas and thick sweater, sped the length of her thin body. She loved autumn. For the abundance of the harvest and the raft of colours and tones that the Earth’s plants brought forth. And she hated autumn. Autumn ushered in the cold, and for that, autumn could not be forgiven.
She dropped two tea bags into the brown crockery teapot and headed for her rocker.
The old chair was the only piece of furniture her mother had owned. Her mother had found the chair on the prairie, sprawled on its side, dusted in prairie silt and strewn with a spider’s webbing. The spider, its abdomen bulging with a white egg sac, was larger than any her mother had seen. After the egg sac broke open and the mass of squirming creatures scurried onto the ground, disappearing amongst the grasses, Elinor’s mother tied a rope around the rocker and dragged it back to their camp. She knew that where Spider had taken up residence and given birth would be a place of creativity and stories.
Elinor eased her stiff body into the rocker. Tugging at her socks, she wondered what the temperature had gotten to in the night.
At first her mother had been frightened by the rocker, the way it rolled back and forth but didn’t go anywhere. Theirs was the only tipi with such a contraption. For a long while no one went near the chair except Elinor’s mother and Elinor’s baby sister, who knew no fear. Over time everyone in the camp came to have a look. And some — there were always those who sought a bit of excitement and risk — chose to sit in the rocker and experience its ride.
Elinor — in those days she was called Red Sky in the Morning — was the only one who saw that the rocker could move of its own accord. It happened in winter, when the nights were long and the moon in its fullness showered light through the smoke hole at the top of the tipi. The creaking came first. Squeerk. Squeerk. Squeerk. Then Elinor saw them: babies, tiny children, old men and young women. They spoke in words she didn’t understand. Sometimes the voices were joyous, filled with mirth and laughter; other times there was sadness and crying. Years later when Elinor remembered those times, she’d recognize the sounds as English and German, then French, and finally Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine.
Elinor urged her body out of the rocker. Using two hands to steady her movement, she spilled hot water over the tea bags. She took milk from the fridge and the sugar bowl from the cupboard. Leaning against the counter, waiting for the tea to brew — she liked it strong so the flavour clung to her tongue — she studied the rocker. An invisible patina, layers of her life, covered the chair’s surface. Sweat and grease from the palms of her father, husband, and brothers. Jam and candy from her children’s fingers, tears from their sorrows. And salt, oil, and flour — a remembrance from the years when she made the bannock.
She squeezed the tea bags against the side of the pot, filled a cup two-thirds full, leaving space for lots of milk and two heaping teaspoons of sugar.
She returned to the rocker.
The tea burned her tongue but she didn’t mind. She liked the graze of the hot liquid slipping down her throat, plunking into her belly. She smiled at the sound of the honking. Honking. Honking. Loud and louder. Then soft and softer.
Canada geese. Black-necked birds that cleaved the skies in a V.
The rocker faced east, overlooking the valley. When Alice, Elinor’s granddaughter, was in high school, she’d researched the geological history of the valley. Although Elinor had listened intently to Alice’s enthusiastic recitation of all the facts she had accumulated, Elinor remembered none of it.
Elinor was acquainted with the valley in ways that woul
d never get into a school textbook. She knew the valley’s steepest flanks, its hidden portals, the calm waters where ducks nested. She knew that the grasses faded by summer to shades of biscuit, buff, and tan and that the oval leaves of the saskatoon bush curled to burnt orange. She knew the strong blow of the wind and how it whispered when the moon rose. She knew, without the aid of her eyes, the best places to hunt rabbit, quail, and gopher, where strawberries, wild onion, saskatoon berries, and the healing herbs were most prolific.
She knew … she knew …
Elinor drained the mug of the last drop of tea. She rolled her lips together and licked the sweetness from them. And as it was wont to do these days, her mind rolled over to another time in her life.
That school had been a betrayal of the valley’s past. The white frame building stood in the middle of the valley like a canker, sucking life from all that entered its doors. When the thing burned down a few years ago, Elinor was surprised by the relief that had come to her. She tried to remember the silly song that she’d made up for herself during the difficult times, something with colours, red berries, and egg yolk. It frustrated her how stories and experiences that had been so important at one time couldn’t be retrieved from her mind, while other things, memories that she wanted to be free of, remained permanently stuck, entrenched like a badger in its hole.
The outhouse was the one place to which she could escape at that school. Out of sight, the lock on her side of the door, she’d watch the shadows of tree branches jump on the walls or a long-legged spider amble the width of the little building. Even though her cottage had indoor plumbing, she still used the outhouse from time to time. Especially in the summers she enjoyed the warm, close space that held the smells of rotting wood, lye, shit, and pee.
Elinor shivered and tugged the crocheted shawl around her shoulders. It had been a gift from her sister, Lillian, for her last birthday. She stared at the black iron stove in the corner of the room and told herself she should make a fire. If Joseph was alive he would have done that already.
Over the nine decades of her life she had not forgotten her first day at that school. It was autumn and a short time after her people had moved onto the reserves. She was ten, maybe eleven. Long after the rattling boards and squeaking wooden spokes of her father’s horse-drawn wagon had disappeared into the first dip of the trail, she’d cried. Like the creeks in springtime, the tears had gushed from her eyes. Still her father didn’t look back.
Within minutes of her father’s departure she was stripped of her clothing, scrubbed with a harsh brush, soap and cold water, until every inch of her body throbbed. The hair cutting followed. The yellow planks of the pine flooring disappeared beneath the swirls and clumps of black hair. A White Neck, the name they gave to the nuns, wielded scissors like a farmer with a scythe in a field of weeds. How cold her ears had been that day. The entire time she was at that school they never got warm.
Never cut the hair again, Elinor muttered, bringing a match to a sprig of sweetgrass. Most mornings she smudged. Leaning forward, she cupped her hands and scooped the sweet smoke toward her.
To her eyes so she might see more clearly …
To her ears so she listened with greater wisdom …
To her mouth so her lips would speak with truthfulness …
In the four directions.
She gave thanks to the Creator for the Earth, the waters, the sky, and all creatures and plants. And for those who were choosing to build on the land, she asked that they thank the creatures who would lose their homes. If it was a day when she planned to paint — those came less often now — she thanked the Creator for the gift of being able to create, to put to paper in colour and shape her experiences of the Earth, images from inside her head, and sentiments and textures, feelings, from the depths of her heart.
She pressed together her shrunken lips. No teeth. Still in the glass by her bed. That would be an advantage of one of those homes. Someone would fetch her dentures.
Louise, her daughter, thought Elinor should be in a home, one of those places where a young girl made tea and brought it to you. She wouldn’t need to worry about anything, Louise said. But Elinor didn’t worry now; she imagined she’d worry more in one of those places. Besides, one of those homes wouldn’t want an old Cree woman. Politicians weren’t interested in helping Indians to live longer. Her people had signed Treaty Four in 1874. It was now 1967, or ’68, she couldn’t keep track. It had taken almost a hundred years, until 1960, for her people to get the vote. That was how much the government cared for her people.
One of those homes might take her sister, Lillian. She was fussier about her house, her clothing, her entire life. As far as Elinor knew, Lillian didn’t smoke or burn the herbs.
Some days Elinor longed to be back on the reserve. But after Joseph’s death she couldn’t bear it. Even though her friends, women she had grown up with, begged her to stay on. And when John, Louise’s husband, told her about the cottage, she knew it was all she needed.
She yawned. The past few weeks, awakened by voices, faces she couldn’t bring into focus, she’d not slept well. The voices urged her to speak, to get on with the telling of what for so long she had kept to herself. But what she must speak of required a receptacle, a vessel, just as the seeds she planted needed moist and warm earth before they would sprout.
Perhaps her daughter was ready now.
She took up the book that was never far from her, the same book she’d been reading for twenty years. Others read the Bible every day; she read Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. The book was missing a couple of pages; those that remained were dry and yellowed. Her sister, Lillian, had passed on the book, said she didn’t like it much, found it too hard to follow. Given that the two sisters often differed (at least back then) on anything from politics to clothes to what type of soap to buy, Elinor figured she might find the book interesting. And she did. The descriptions of the mist, marshes, fog, and damp of the English countryside fascinated her. As did the array of people Dickens spread over his pages. Some were rough and harsh, even cruel. Others were gentle and generous. There were tidy and proper folks and others who were mangy and dirty, flea-infested. Pip, who told the story, was an orphan, and that being so, he claimed a special place in her heart.
Where was her magnifying glass? Under the book. She withdrew the duck feather she used as a bookmark and settled in. Five minutes later she was asleep.
2
Elinor gazed at the hairy brute. Stocky, broad-chested, head as big as a boulder — a handsome fellow despite his circumstances. From the far reaches of her mind her father’s voice, slow and sonorous, spoke of a time when the plains were dark with grazing, roaming, rutting walnut-brown bison. She’d met paskwâwi-mostos in her dreams; in her wakefulness the smell of his long hair, the sound of his thick breathing lingered.
He was still a grand creature, despite being housed behind glass, doused in artificial light. Although she preferred the real thing, at least this fellow wasn’t going anywhere. Probably her own legs couldn’t travel much farther than his. She was grateful for the assistance of the town’s postmistress, who lent her car and son to drive Elinor into the city. Without Jeremy’s assistance, she wasn’t sure she would have made it from the parking lot to the basement of the museum. The Museum of Natural History; she saw nothing natural about a stuffed creature behind glass. Better that he had been able to return to the earth at a pace decided by his own body, the worms, wolves and vultures.
Big Brown. That’s what I’ll call you. I hope that’s acceptable. It’s a pleasure to be with you. I had no idea you were here, Big Brown. Red Sky in the Morning was the name that was first given to me; a red star burned in the sky while mother laboured. I was born in the springtime, in the valley. In that school they named me Elinor; they did more than change my name in that place. But we won’t speak of that now, Big Brown.
She took out her pencil and flipped open her sketch pad. She made a few bold strokes and a half-dozen ovals of diffe
rent sizes to represent the different areas of the body: Head. Torso. Hips. Shoulders and legs.
Working in small strokes, moving outward from the top and centre, Elinor sketched the oval perimeter of the head. She went down one side to the beard then did the same on the other side. She put crosses to mark the place for the eyes; she’d work on them last. She stared at the neck. Massive and thick, far shorter than the necks of deer, horses, and antelope, it was barely discernible between the head and shoulders. Given the size of the head, how could it be otherwise? She marked out the bulge of the right shoulder and sketched a line down to the knee.
When her fingers started to cramp, she put down her pencil, stretched out her fingers, and squeezed them into a fist. She repeated the movements two or three times. She couldn’t work as long as she used to. In her prime she’d keep at the work for ten or twelve hours a day, several days running. Now she had good and bad days. Some days she worked standing up, other days she’d sit. She stepped back to get a different perspective. Spotting the rabbit crouched in the corner of the gallery, she muttered its name: “Wâposos, wâposos.”
She moved closer to the gallery, then back. She looked at what she’d drawn, then to the bison, then back to her drawing. She shook her head.
Proportions aren’t right, Big Brown. Head needs to be larger, neck thicker.
She told herself this picture would take some time.
She dropped into her chair. Her eyelids flickered then slid downward.
The tail of the bison twitched.
3
Louise had always loved Mary. Not that she would say that to Mary. Theirs was not the kind of relationship in which one discussed feelings about the other. Most of the time Louise didn’t put the two words — Mary and love — in the same sentence, even though Mary took up a large part of Louise’s heart, as she had for most of her life. Some might say Louise didn’t have much of a heart, the things she’d done in her life. But Louise knew she wasn’t without heart, she just didn’t wear it on her sleeve. Frequently she tipped waitresses a little extra. When she knew a client was barely scraping by, she charged him less than the going rate. For years she’d helped out at the animal shelter on holiday weekends, cleaning out pens, brushing matted fur from decrepit, scabby cats, bathing flea-ridden dogs.
Tears in the Grass Page 1